Eric: I’m now in the States, so I’m drinking American beer for the next few months. This poses an interesting problem in unit conversion. Why? America used to use Alcohol By Weight (ABW) to list alcohol content, and Canada uses Alcohol By Volume (ABV). Since alcohol is less dense than water (specific gravity of 0.79336 to be exact), the ABW value will be less than the ABV value for equal amounts of alcohol. This means that American beer appears to be weaker on the label, since the percentage of alcohol is less. This leads to the myth that ‘American beer is weaker than Canadian beer.’
But that doesn’t really matter anymore, because most American beers are listed in alcohol by volume. Bud Light tastes like piss not because it has less alcohol, but because it really is piss.
Now that we all learned something, lets get on to the drinking part. I spent the last week in Hollywood at a competition, and that means lots of time in hotels, and that means some Bran Van 3000 Drinking in LA. Those of you who didn’t get the Bran Van 3000 reference are probably too young to drink. That’s a good thing, because The Iron Warrior does not encourage underage drinking. Go pick up Big Shiny Tunes 2 and you’ll understand what I’m talking about.
So I have two American beers that I’d like to tell you about. The first one is Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. This American Pale Ale is a little hoppy, but not too bitter. It’s quite drinkable, but also very tasty. In other words, I like this beer a lot, and it gets a high rating. 4.5 Surly Bartenders!
Now for a sad story. This story starts with me buying a beer called Shocktop. It claimed to be a Belgian White beer. I then got it back to my hotel room, opened it, poured a glass, took a sip from said glass, and realized that it wasn’t very good. Actually, it was pretty awful. It was weak and didn’t taste much like a white beer at all.
Now, I had bought a large bottle of this beer, and since I couldn’t not drink it (it’s beer after all), I drank it. Then I read the label. This ‘Belgian White’ was brewed by Anheuser-Busch. You know, the people that brew other fantastic beers including Budweiser and Busch. Since sarcasm doesn’t come out well in paper form, let me point out that the last sentence was sarcastic.
So since it’s neither Belgian nor White nor tasty, avoid Shocktop. I think it’s not available in Canada, so you shouldn’t have to worry about accidentally buying it like I did. This disappointment of a beverage gets our lowest rating yet, 0.5 Surly Bartenders. I’ve decided that 0 Surly Bartenders is reserved for a beer which I refuse to finish.
Next week, we study other fascinating unit conversion anomalies.
Cheers,
Eric and Graeme
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